Aid Does Not Always Help Incumbents: An Experiment on Voter Behaviour in Malawi

• In Event: Experiments on Voter Participation and Partisanship in Southern and East Africa

Abstract

How does foreign aid affect incumbent tenure and democratic accountability? We evaluate these questions by measuring expected voting behavior among 2,000 citizens and school officials before and after the delivery of a randomly assigned education aid project and information campaign. Consistent with hypotheses about aid and incumbency, we find that those communities which benefited from the project were more likely to support incumbents. However, voters excluded from the project were also less likely to support incumbents. This sanctioning effect was particularly strong among voters who perceived their community as deserving of the aid funds. Contrary to much of the critical consensus about aid, the results also imply that aid does not promote incumbent tenure independent of programmatic performance. The results also suggest that aid can – when transparently allocated – improve accountability relationships between voters and politicians, and may induce better programmatic performance.
 

Authors

• Ryan Steele Jablonski, London School of Economics and Political Science

• Brigitte Seim, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill